LORRAN LIMA The first case of COVID-19 in Brazil was registered on February 24th, 2020. A 61-year-old businessman living in the state of São Paulo was infected after traveling to Italy. On March 16th, the first COVID-19 death, a 62-year-old man, was also registered in the state of São Paulo. The Brazilian Minister of Health…
Month: March 2020
Indigenous in the Brazilian Amazon: Refusing Missionaries and ‘Us’, the Global Plague
BARBARA ARISI Last Sunday started with my phone ringing from a Dutch government alert. On my screen, as for all citizens of the country that use a smartphone (2G or 3G models did not receive it): “Noodmelding NL alert22-03-2020. Volg instructies Rijksoverheid op: houd 1,5 meter afstand! Bent U ziek of verkouden? Bijf thuis. Bescherm…
Lessons for Self-Isolation from Chronically Ill Patients
RITTI SONCCO Since the first cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in the UK, the freedoms of movement, socialisation and conviviality that many of us take for granted have been radically reduced. But for patients who are chronically ill, the social patterns currently dictated by the government are very familiar. My social anthropology research involves fieldwork…
Stuck Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Risk Assessment and Ethical Dilemmas in the Time of Covid-19
The View From The Front Line As Osteopath/Medical Anthropologist MARIA LARRAIN A week ago, the diary started to look unusually quiet but not surprising giving how the news about coronavirus was unfolding. I had expected that we may have to close if a full lockdown was enforced and started to look into taking video consultations…
Life Under Quarantine, and now Surveillance: A Dispatch From Greece
ALEXIA LIAKOUNAKOU It’s been more than a week since the Greek government announced that all Greeks are required to isolate at home. On 13th March, the prime minister broadcast a formal address in which he ordered the temporary closure of cafes, restaurants and most other private businesses, urging everyone to stay at home indefinitely. The…
Memoirs From A Month in the Future
LOUIS A G WILKES After finally being let off the plane by a fully suited and booted contagion specialist, my wife and I arrived back in Nanjing, China on the 8th of February. A week prior – at the end of a Spring Festival that will be signified in history as the beginning of this…
COVID-19: We are the ‘underlying conditions’
LUCY NEILAND Repost from Ipsos MORI Ipsos MORI’s award-winning Ethnography Centre of Excellence has been engaging with people who have underlying conditions, exploring how they are adapting to life in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our ethnographers have pulled together an unfiltered view of their stories to develop an empathetic understanding of in-situ behaviours and beliefs….
Coronavirus and Capitalist Realism
ADAM LEON BRISLEY There was something about the images in the press of North American kids defiantly attending “spring break” parties in Miami last week (1) that made me think of a famous quote from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. (2)…
Coronavirus- Is this our Microbiopolitical Moment?
DARREN OLLERTON Despite following the early emergence of coronavirus with zeal — a combination of intellectual intrigue and morbid fascination with the science fiction potential of pandemic — it took me some time to fully digest the wholesale impact of the current contagion. I can’t deny that this may also have been somewhat facilitated by…
Same Virus, Different Temporalities: Anticipations From Mexico
LAURA MONTESI 21st of March – Oaxaca, Mexico – Day 5 of voluntary quarantine It’s the 21st of March and the official epidemiological record in Mexico reports 203 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 606 suspicious cases, and 2 deaths. Compared with the 47,021 cases of people detected with SARS-Cov-2 in Italy or the 19,980 in Spain…
Grasping for Unity in a Divided Britain: Ageism, Brexit-Era Politics & the COVID-19 ‘Boomer Remover’
REBECCA IRONS On the 19th March, the day before Boris Johnson ordered restaurants closed, I walked past the window of a packed Wagamama. The day that it had been announced that London would be facing lockdown, tube stations would be closing, and the UK had reached a state of emergency…and there, in that Wagamama, was…
Coronavirus and Social Isolation: 16 Insights from Digital Anthropology
GEORGIANA MURARIU Repost from Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing We recently conducted nine 16 month studies on the use of smartphones by older people, which is the main source of insights here. You can read more about the project here. Additional insights are also drawn from Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of People (Polity, 2017), a…
Connections During Coronavirus: From Cuba to Brazil
CLAUDIA FONSECA It hit us with unexpected suddenness, just as it did most other people. José and I had been taking the public buses all that week of the Medical Anthropology conference in Cuba. We’d chosen to stay in our private hostel, located in a working-class district near the center of Havana instead of going…
COVID-19 in Cuba: Some Reflections At The Beginning Of The Crisis.
SAHRA GIBBON I have just returned from the Society for Medical Anthropology meeting in Havana which went ahead just days before the bans and restrictions on travel intensified. Going to Cuba after nearly a 12 year absence was not only an opportunity to reflect personally on the changes that have happened there since my last…
“Consciously Quarantined: A COVID-19 response from the Social Sciences” Introduction to Series
REBECCA IRONS & SAHRA GIBBON The past term has been tumultuous, to say the least. Industrial action across UK Universities meant that classes and research were disrupted for a month whilst striking members of staff were absent (for the second time this academic year), resulting in a time of uncertainty and frustration for many. However,…
Book Launch: “Critical Medical Anthropology: Perspectives in and from Latin America”
You can Download this book for free here. We are pleased to announce the publication of the edited volume “Critical Medical Anthropology: Perspectives in and from Latin America”, edited by academics from UCL Anthropology, UCL Global Health, and CIESAS Mexico. Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring work from scholars doing and engaging with ethnographic research in…
(CLOSED) CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS Consciously Quarantined: A COVID-19 response from the Social Sciences
As the situation surrounding COVID-19 intensifies and concern mounts, many of us will be self-isolating and facing the next few weeks quarantined at home. This makes it an opportune moment to collectively gather our thoughts and reflect critically on the unfolding situation and the wider effects that this pandemic will have on humans and society….